It’s revealing that when Janet Lucas had the interim athletic director’s job at UC Riverside dumped into her lap last October, she did not move into the big office.

She stayed, instead, in the same 10-foot by 15-foot room where she’d operated as executive associate athletic director and senior women’s administrator.

“You never know what might happen,” she said.

It may have been a way of reassuring her coaches and staff members, a number depleted by departures for various reasons and then shaken up by AD Jim Wooldridge’s forced resignation. The message: There are still seasons to play, student-athletes to coach and jobs to do, and giving in to the tumult only gets in the way.

The annual end-of-year honor roll for area colleges doesn’t have the equivalent of an Executive of the Year award. If there were it would go to Lucas, specifically because she kept the ship afloat when it could just as easily have capsized.

“Early on, and through most of her tenure (as the department’s No. 2 administrator), I was never a huge fan,” said Amy Harrison, a former UCR athlete and an influential donor. “She never put herself out there. She’s reserved, quiet, stays to herself.

“… Having said that, she stepped into this role and did a very good job, to the point that I’d rather leave it like it is than put the wrong person in the position.”

The footnote to all of this is that Lucas will not be considered by chancellor Kim Wilcox for the permanent position. Instead, she likely will slide back into the No. 2 job when a new athletic director is hired, potentially before the end of this month.

Keeping that small office, then, was a smart move.

But office space was the least of her worries. Wooldridge’s departure, and the way it was handled, created discontent both internally and externally. Meanwhile, 10 administrative positions were vacant, including that of the department’s chief financial officer, two compliance positions, two marketing positions and the ticket manager.

“Literally, the message I sent to everybody in our department and externally, to our Athletics Association folks, was that it was a time to pull together,” she said. “We needed to rebuild the infrastructure of our department and focus on hiring the right people for the right positions … I’d say initially it was triage mode.”

Lucas had been an interim athletic director before, at Cal State Northridge during the 2005-06 school year. That helped, as did her eight years of experience navigating UCR’s bureaucracy.

But this was new territory, especially with staffing and funding challenges and the necessity of handling not only her new responsibilities but her old ones — and portions of two other vacant jobs, as well. And all of that came with no knowledge of what the future would hold.

“I’ve sat in that ‘interim’ chair for a year,” said men’s basketball coach Dennis Cutts, who had his own interim tag as head coach removed after a year. “It’s comfortable at times and uncomfortable at times because of the uncertainty. You don’t know what’s down the road, and that’s a hard place to be.

“(But) we’ve got a very good coaching staff in here now, and the coaches took it upon themselves to tighten their ships with their programs.”

The spirit of cooperation probably reached its height when UCR hosted the Big West track and field championships last month.

“Hosting an event that size, with the year that we’ve had and with the staffing challenges we have had, in a manner that really put our best foot forward … it really speaks volumes to me,” Lucas said. “It truly was all hands on deck. We talked about that a lot during the year, but that event in itself was the culmination of all those kinds of efforts.

“… It would have been easy to pull apart and have everybody take care of their own shop, their own agendas, and that’s not what we saw.”

Said Harrison:

“There’s nothing she could have done differently. And she showed she had the talent to do this, to keep things together with spit and glue. She didn’t even have a financial person until (a month) ago. But she stayed on the straight and narrow and did a wonderful job.”

Lucas, not surprisingly, was diplomatic when asked if she was disappointed to not receive more consideration for the full-time job.

“I said at the very start of this that it’s up to the chancellor to find what he thinks is the best fit, and I’m still going to say that’s his decision to make,” she said.

But this much is certain: Whoever gets that job will be a better administrator simply by listening to, and trusting, the lady in the small office.

Jim Alexander is an Inland Empire native who started with his hometown newspaper, The Press-Enterprise, longer ago than he cares to admit. He's been a sports columnist off and on since 1992, and a full-time columnist since 2010. Yes, he's opinionated, but no, that's not the only club in his bag. He's covered every major league and major sports beat in Southern California over the years, so not much surprises him any more. (And he and Justin Turner have this in common: Both attended Cal State Fullerton. Jim has no plans to replicate Turner's beard.)

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